The 90somethings’ Passover Secret: Adapt, Adapt

At 94, my grandmothers are the most seasoned chefs I know. Passovers come and Passovers go, but Tessie Weinreb and Pearlie Feldman understand the Haggadah’s underlying lessons of freedom and survival better than most: They adapt.

“Listen, Joyele,” Pearlie told me recently, invoking her Brooklynese patois to express her wishes for Pesach this year, “I would like to blow the family.” Translation: She wants to treat everyone to a meal.

Tessie, likewise, may be too old to ready her kosher kitchen for the elaborate Seder feasts she once prepared, opening her mahogany sideboard table to its full 12-foot length to accommodate dozens of relatives. But she doesn’t hesitate to cast her former slavish devotion to hand-ground gefilte fish in a very modern light. “You gotta be crazy to do it,” she advises. “If you’ve got half a brain, you get ready-made, and it’s good. In a jar. And it’s clean.”

If there is a secret du cuisine my two bubbes have imparted through the years, it is breathtakingly simple. You shitaron (“pour it in”). Suffice it to say that it is the primary instruction Pearlie and Tessie offer when sharing one of their recipes.

What they mean to say is, you improvise. You use what you’ve got, whatever it is. Just like sharing your past, you pour it in. Memory by memory. Heart to heart.

For the last two years, I’ve spent more time than usual in the company of my grandmothers, writing a book about them. Luckily, their memories are still very much intact.

Tessie and Pearlie live alone, and each still cooks for herself (Tessie in Queens, Pearlie in Santa Monica). Even now, as they show me how to whip up their standard Jewish fare--from matzo ball soup to Passover kugel--I’m in awe of their strength, their determination not to be a “boyden.”

Ask Tessie how she feels, and she’ll reply: “Ma-schlep-se.” It means, “I drag myself.” But she’s happy she can still schlep.Ask Pearlie how she is, and she answers: “You fight. You fight. What else is there?” Self-sufficiency is a cherished ingredient of life. And nowhere is this lesson better practiced than in the kitchen, preparing food.

“Did your mother teach you how to do that?” I asked Pearlie recently, watching her wrap up another stuffed cabbage.

“Nope,” she replied.

“Where did you learn?”

“By myself.”

So the matriarchs of my family show me how to endure, with food as salve. Food as memory. Food as symbol, like the shank bone and bittersweet herbs on the Passover plate.

“I do remember one thing,” Pearlie told me of her girlhood Passovers on the Lower East Side of New York at the beginning of this century. “Mama used to work so hard. We’d change all the dishes, wash and wipe ‘em. We even had special wash basins. It would take a whole day just to clean all the silverware. Mama had a separate table to prepare. Everything had to be separate. Everything had to be Pesachdik--good for Passover.

“At the Seder, my father was dressed beautiful in his prayer shawl. But I couldn’t understand why the women had to take the water and wash the men’s hands at the table. I said, ‘Why should the women cater to the men?’ The man was like the lord of the house, and the poor women had to do everything--make the gefilte fish and cook and schlep everything. My mother said, ‘You gotta respect the man. He’s like the king.’

“Personally, I think it’s nice to give them the respect, but I can’t see washing their hands.”

Beyond the Bible stories about Moses and slavery, my grandmothers tell their own Passover tales. Back in her shtetl of Kozowa in Galicia (part of the Ukraine), for instance, Grandma Tessie explained, it was my paternal great-grandfather’s reverence for Passover that ultimately readied him to come to America.

“My father wasn’t very wealthy,” Tessie says of Chaim Teitel, a deeply pious Jew with a long red beard, “but he was known in the city.”

Like the Israelites in Egypt, Chaim was a brick-maker. He operated a factory on the outskirts of town. Legend has it that one fateful Passover, Chaim asked one of his workers to retrieve a special wooden board from the attic for Pesach preparations. Hours later, he realized that his employee, sodden from liquor, had not followed orders. Outraged that his wife couldn’t begin making food for the Seder because her special work table was unavailable, Chaim confronted the man. He gave him a zetz, a whack, across the face.

Apparently, it was a stronger blow than intended: His worker collapsed and died.

“Somebody squealed that my father killed a man,” Grandma Tessie told me one night, during a commercial break from her favorite TV game show, “Jeopardy!” “That’s all the police and the gendarmes had to hear. So, they finally decided to exhume the body. But the doctor took a look at his liver. He said he didn’t die from anything except cirrhosis of the liver. He was a big drunk.

“My father got free. But he was ready to run away to America.”

Tessie arrived in Brooklyn just a month before women were granted the right to vote in the United States. The next year, she opened a mom-and-pop grocery store with my grandfather, Izzy Horowitz, before they married. For Passover in 1922, he bestowed upon her a lovely navy suit with a beaded handbag to match. Plus a sheer pink blouse. “He always tried to impress me he had the money,” she told me. “ ‘He vos vorkin’. I made $21 a week and gave it to my parents.”

A new suit for Passover is a recurring motif. My uncle Freddie, for instance, likes to tell about Tessie and her sister Gussie storming Pilkin Avenue in search of a Pesach suit for him. The suit had to have knickers and longies and a vest. It had to be a sturdy wool worsted so that, when outgrown, it could go to a brother or cousin. And the price had to be right.

“My mother, Gussie, was the maven, and Aunt Tussle was the shrewd, eagle-eyed handeler [business woman],” Freddie remembers. “I had nothing to say about it. From store to store, I was schlepped. What Gussie liked, Tessie tore apart. What Tessie liked, Gussie disqualified ‘the material.’ These were two pros who had all the salesmen on the strip shaking with terror when they walked. Frankly, I was getting ticked off--trying on, trying on, trying on--not that I would say so to my mother or aunt.”

Asked to corroborate this version of events, Tessie recoiled. “It was never that way,” she told me. “He makes me sound like a schnorer, a yenta [a beggar, a shrew]. Freddie exaggerated, very much so.

“I swear to you on all that is holy, I never went with Gussie to buy a suit for Freddie. Really.” She reconsiders. “I once went for a spring coat. I saw an oil spot on the coat. So, she took another one. No big deal. Oy, Freddie, what he can do.”

Last year, Grandma Pearlie finally got even with the men whose hands she used to wash. For my parents’ Seder in Beverly Hills, she had knitted purple skullcaps for everyone at the table. Although traditionally reserved for men, the skullcaps we donned--women and men, my daughter and sons--showed us to be equals at the table. Equally free.

And equally vulnerable. As my father, battling an incurable form of cancer, presided at the table with remarkable courage, he asked that we open the door for the prophet, Elijah, a long-standing tradition that signifies the coming of a better world.

Then he also reminded us of Miriam, the prophetess, for whom my mother had left another glass of wine. In the span of four generations, my family had made a tiny, though perceptible, shift. With my grandmothers, we were celebrating a patriarchy of matriarchs. Of contradiction and renewal.

Some things, though, never change. The text. The children asking questions. Finding the afikomen, the matzo hidden like magic. Remembering the plagues and singing “Dayenu.” Thinking about next year, in Jerusalem.

Still, in my family, the most pressing question remains the same, year after year: “When do we eat?” The query would be considered sacrilegious by Tessie’s father, Chaim. But my bubbe wouldn’t mind.

“Look, when you love someone, you have to allow for faults,” Tessie explains. “Because nobody’s poy-fect. There is no such person in this world that should be poy-fect. This is how I look at things.”

And Pearlie? “Passover means getting together with the family. And a lot of good food. Family and food. That’s my life.”

GRANDMA PEARLIE’S PASSOVER APPLE KUGEL

I’ll tell ya, I lost this recipe some time ago. So, I’m gonna give it to you by doing it from my hand and mouth. You just shitaron, pour it on. That’s all.

OK, so it’s 4 matzos and 2 green apples, peeled and sliced thin.

A little grated lemon or orange peel, maybe a teaspoon.

Or 1 teaspoon vanilla, if you want. Vanilla’s even better, really, but I just ran out.

Plus cinnamon, to taste, mixed with sugar, about 3/4 cup of sugar.

And it’s 4 eggs and one stick butter or margarine and golden raisins.

You gotta wash off the matzos to make them softer. So you just wet them under the tap but not for too long.

Mix the eggs well. Add sugar and cinnamon and stir. Add butter, but don’t worry about it being creamy. Big hunks of butter are OK, too. Then add the raisins and grated rind. A little lemon juice is nice, too, with that cinnamon.

Butter a rectangular two-inch deep pan. Put in a whole matzo and layer the egg mixture and sliced apples. Then more egg. Then another matzo. Continue adding a little of each--the egg, more cinnamon and sugar, more apple. You can add slivers of unsalted almonds on top, if you like. And a dozen pitted prunes is good, too. Sprinkle sugar on top. It’s very good to serve with meat. If you’re kosher, you can use oil instead of butter.

Put it in a 400-degree oven. After 15 minutes, reduce the heat to 350 degrees but keep the kugel covered and cook for about 40 more minutes.

Makes 8 servings, more or less